John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged education · everything

Pocket

Want to Retain Information Better? Try This Popular, 70-Year-Old Note-Taking Method

The Cornell Note-taking System divides a page into three sections—a narrow left column for "cues" (key points and self-generated test questions), a wider right column for standard notes, and a bottom section for summaries—to help you engage more deeply with material through active review and self-testing. The article recommends personalizing the system by adding emotions you experienced during the presentation and specific commitments or actions you'll take based on what you learned, both of which strengthen memory retention and encourage behavioral change.

Permalink productivityeducationlearning

wipebook.com

Wipebook Reusable Whiteboard Notebooks & Dry Erase Flip Charts

This is a Wipebook product/marketing page arguing that covering classroom or office walls with reusable dry-erase flipcharts (rather than relying on a single fixed whiteboard) boosts collaborative problem-solving, giving every student or team member "20 times" the writing surface to sketch, revise, and think visibly. It bundles the pitch with a product lineup (Flipcharts, Workbooks, Notebooks, Scan app) and links out to teacher testimonials and blog posts showing real classroom uses—vertical non-permanent surfaces, small-group ELA strategies, inclusive participation for quiet students, and PD success stories—making it a useful reference for concrete implementation ideas rather than just the sales pitch itself.

Permalink collaborationeducationnotebookswhite

Volunteering To Build Global Community

Global Learners | Discovery Education

Building a more peaceful, healthy, and mutually respectful world begins at the level of personal interactions. Peace Corps Volunteers not only work alongside communities as partners and learners, but act as emissaries for their own communities here in the United States in each one-on-one interaction in their host country.

Permalink culturecommunityeducation

archive.org

Internet Archive: Johnny Cash

Archive of old Johnny Cash variety shows. Want to watch some of the musical performances. Dillon episode should be a gem.

The Internet Archive is a digital library offering free access to books, movies, music, and historical web pages through the Wayback Machine.

Permalink booksprivacyeducationinternet

www.howtogeek.com

BASIC ruled the '80s. Here's why Python quietly became the new gateway to coding

Framed as a nostalgic case for why Python has effectively replaced BASIC as the default on-ramp into programming, this piece walks through the parallels: both were bundled or trivially accessible on the machines of their era (home computers then, Linux/graphing calculators/downloads now), both offer low-stakes interactive environments with immediate feedback rather than compile cycles, and both are backed by a huge ecosystem of beginner-friendly books and tutorials (from type-in BASIC programs in old magazines to Sweigart's "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python"). The author, drawing on his own '80s/'90s BASIC background, argues Python earns the "spiritual successor" label precisely because it preserves that approachable, tinkerable feel while scaling up to serious work like data science.

Permalink historyprogrammingsoftwareeducation

www.upworthy.com

How do you know someone is smart?

The Dunning-Kruger effect causes less intelligent people to overestimate their abilities while highly intelligent people underestimate theirs, yet humans have evolved to judge others' intelligence reasonably well. Drawing on Reddit responses, the piece identifies eighteen behavioral markers of genuine intelligence, including intellectual humility (admitting what you don't know), adaptability (changing views with new evidence), clear communication tailored to your audience, and curiosity. Rather than displaying confidence or dominance, truly intelligent people tend to listen more than talk, ask thoughtful questions, and focus on getting things right rather than being right.

Permalink communicationpsychologyadviceeducation

www.logicalfallacies.org

Logical Fallacies - List of Logical Fallacies with Examples

This piece introduces logical fallacies as errors in reasoning that can be either intentional or unintentional, explaining how they undermine argument credibility by appealing to emotion rather than logic. It distinguishes between formal fallacies, which involve structural errors in arguments, and informal fallacies, which stem from problems with content, context, or presentation. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing these flaws to evaluate arguments critically and avoid being misled.

Permalink adviceeducationcritical thinking

www.eamesinstitute.org

Toys & Eames Design Philosophy | Eames Institute

The Eameses collected and studied toys not as frivolous objects but as windows into design principles and universal human truths—toys exemplified "good design" through anonymous authorship and perfect execution of their essential purpose, whether a kite's ability to fly or a top's "spin-ness." They systematically analyzed toys across cultures and time periods both as functional objects to be played with and as intellectual artifacts, using this understanding to inform their groundbreaking work in everything from furniture to educational films, ultimately recognizing that toys served as the most effective medium for communicating complex ideas to audiences of all ages.

Permalink designphilosophyfilmeducation

rayli.net

Top 10 data mining algorithms in plain English | rayli.net

This guide explains ten influential data mining algorithms selected by expert panels, covering how each works, why it's useful, and where to find implementations. The algorithms span classification methods like C4.5 and CART (which build decision trees), clustering techniques like k-means and EM, association rule learning with Apriori, and ranking/recommendation approaches like PageRank, alongside ensemble methods like AdaBoost, distance-based classification with kNN, probabilistic classification with Naive Bayes, and support vector machines for finding optimal separating boundaries. Each explanation includes practical examples—such as predicting patient cancer risk or identifying frequently purchased grocery combinations—to illustrate core concepts like supervised versus unsupervised learning, and discusses the strengths and limitations of each approach.

Permalink aieducationtutorialdata

JavaScript, JavaScript...

Understanding JavaScript’s ‘undefined’ | JavaScript, JavaScript...

JavaScript distinguishes between three separate concepts that all use the word "undefined": the Undefined type, the undefined value (which uninitialized variables and functions without return statements assume), and the undefined global variable property. A ReferenceError occurs when JavaScript tries to access an unresolvable reference—one whose base value cannot be found—which happens when you use an identifier that was never declared with var and isn't a property of an accessible object. To safely check for variables that might not exist (like `console` in older browsers), you can use property access on the global object rather than typeof checks, since accessing an undefined property won't throw an error as long as its base value exists.

Permalink programmingeducationtutorial

Marginal REVOLUTION

Questions that are rarely asked (are we ready for “home college”?)

Robbins proposes a market-based alternative to traditional college: families could pool resources to hire a single highly-qualified professor to teach a small cohort through a customized first-year curriculum at roughly one-third the cost of private college tuition, with students then transferring into degree-granting institutions at the sophomore or junior level. This arrangement would provide intensive instruction in writing, research, and oral presentation skills—particularly valuable for international students—while solving the cost problem that makes selective higher education inaccessible to many families. Robbins argues that if homeschooling has achieved legitimate accreditation at the secondary level, there is no fundamental barrier to creating similar credentialing pathways for this kind of semi-private undergraduate education.

Permalink leadershipadviceeducationbusiness

MDN Web Docs

A re-introduction to JavaScript (JS Tutorial) - JavaScript | MDN

This is a comprehensive guide to JavaScript's core language features covering data types (seven primitives plus objects), operators, control structures, and functions. It explains key concepts like JavaScript's dynamic typing, the distinction between `let`/`const`/`var`, how type coercion works with `==` versus `===`, and the fundamentals of objects and arrays as mutable collections. The piece also introduces advanced topics like closures, classes, asynchronous programming through callbacks/promises/async-await, and the module system, while clarifying the distinction between language-level features (like arithmetic) and runtime-level features (like `console.log()` or DOM access).

Permalink programmingeducationtutorial

www.nizkor.org

www.ted.com

TED: Ideas worth spreading

I don't see a specific article to summarize here—this appears to be a list of TED talk speakers and metadata (play counts, dates) without any actual article content or link. Could you please share the article you'd like me to summarize? You can paste the text, provide a link, or share the title and author.

Permalink educationvideo

net.tutsplus.com

Understanding the Principles of Algorithm Design | Nettuts+

An algorithm is a set of step-by-step instructions for completing a task efficiently—not just any function, but one designed with optimization in mind, like binary search completing in seconds what brute-force searching might take years to do. The article explains how algorithms power major tech companies and provides practical principles for everyday developers: understanding your input, knowing how your tools work under the hood, grasping how your code interacts with the larger system, and systematically reducing unnecessary operations through caching, loop optimization, and clever techniques like divide-and-conquer. Becoming proficient requires consistent study and practice with algorithm challenges to build intuition for writing performant code.

Permalink programmingdevelopmenteducationtutorial

Marginal REVOLUTION

Is Creativity more like IQ or Expertise? — Marginal Revolution

Robert Baer argues that creativity is domain-specific rather than a general ability like IQ, pointing to evidence that even Torrance's own creativity tests showed near-zero correlation between verbal and visual versions, suggesting they measure different skills entirely. This matters because schools have widely used supposedly domain-general creativity tests to select students for gifted programs and teach generic divergent-thinking exercises that fail to develop actual creative capacity, which requires deep engagement within specific domains. Baer contends that fostering creativity requires either breadth across many domains or focused training within a single domain—but not the content-free approach currently dominant in education.

Permalink psychologycreativityeducation

deadspin.com

What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?

Drew Magary retakes the SAT as an adult after 19 years to see whether he's become smarter or dumber, completing a practice test under the same conditions he experienced in 1993—bubble sheets, No. 2 pencils, and all. He discovers that the test remains fundamentally unchanged and poorly designed, relying on outdated technology while charging students thousands in test-prep fees, and finds his own performance improved slightly on the verbal section (where he reads constantly) but declined in math (which he never uses). The essay is less an argument for SAT reform than a darkly funny documentation of how pointless and grueling the standardized test experience remains, structured to punish rather than encourage students and designed by people who seem to actively enjoy making teenagers miserable.

Permalink adviceeducationpersonal financehumor

Popular Science

The Boy Who Played With Fusion [via Longreads]

Taylor Wilson, a 16-year-old nuclear physicist profiled here, has built a working fusion reactor in a university lab after teaching himself nuclear physics through internet research and hands-on experimentation with radioactive materials. Inspired by his grandmother's cancer diagnosis, Wilson conceived the idea of using fusion to generate medical isotopes that could be produced locally in hospitals rather than requiring expensive cyclotrons and jet delivery, and he subsequently designed a neutron detector to scan shipping containers for weapons of mass destruction. Unlike David Hahn, a cautionary tale of an earlier teenage nuclear hobbyist whose secretive experiments led to contamination and arrest, Wilson succeeded by gaining the support of mentors, his unconventional parents who encouraged rather than forbade his dangerous pursuits, and institutions like the Davidson Academy that could provide resources and oversight.

Permalink scienceeducation